Nikolai Fyodorov (1828-1903): The introduction to the piece you'll find on
Blackboard gives you more or less what you need.

Note his illegitimate, mixed-class ancestry – he shared this, by the way, with the famous 19th-century intellectual
and émigré publisher Aleksandr Herzen, a hero of Tom Stoppard’s recent set of plays The Coast of Utopia.
Herzen’s father made up the last name (Герцен) from the German “Herz” ‘heart’ – in case anyone doubted that he
was a love-child. Fyodorov had a sadder childhood, booted out along with his mother when his father died, though
apparently the family continued to support him and his mother until he could earn his own living. I have to
wonder how much this past tinged his concentration on “the fathers” and even his project to bring the fathers
back from the dead.

Male serf owners, even the great poet Aleksandr Pushkin, often thrust their affections on their female serfs, and
some of the resulting children received good educations and moved in society as aristocrats, or joined the
growing group of “racnochintsy” (разночинцы) in the intelligentsia (for more information on raznochintsy, see
http://www.encspb.ru/en/article.php?kod=2804035836").
Serfdom in Russia was not ablished until the great Emancipation reform in 1861.

I offer no questions for reading Fyodorov, since it’s a secondary reading, but please read the intro (pp. 11-15),
then pp. 24-5; pp. 36-39; the top paragraph on p. 46, and pp. 53-4. Skim the rest of the
piece in case you find something of interest to you (philosophy, religion, Russian history (the famine of 1891),
scientific aspirations to climate control…). This piece lacks the final part of Fyodorov’s “Common Task”: once we
resurrect the dead fathers, earth will be crowded, so we’ll need to colonize space and settle all the extra people
on the stars. (Hence the references to astronomy: p. 24, “The unification of all sciences under astronomy…”) Fyodorov
doesn’t say it here, but you can catch the implication, that sexual reproduction won’t be necessary once the
fathers are all back from the dead. As a nice saintly Russian ascetic he presumes that it’s only the atavistic
need to reproduce that fuels sexual desire. (He doesn’t imply, but it would not be much of a leap to conclude,
that if sex and reproduction are out there’ll be no need for daughters and wives, just fathers and sons… See my
SPECIAL NOTE below.) He doesn’t go into the fact that any society with the technology to
resurrect all those dead guys will have no trouble with a trivial thing like ensuring the immortality of everyone
now alive. (A society where the residents can assume immortality shows up very often in science fiction, handled
with a variety of explanations – most often the triumph of medicine, either the ability to cure every ill or the
possibility of regenerating organs or even entire bodies. As we’ll see, immortality though physical reconditioning
can also take a dystopian turn.)

Fyodorov’s technical aspirations (“…to make the universe gradually better, to control the blind forces of nature
which threaten human life…”) resonate strongly with Soviet scientific and technical ambitious, likewise his emphasis
on collective action and taking on this task all together, though he died in 1903, long before 1917. On the other
hand, his writing and emphasis on fathers rings of the all-male communities in monasteries on Mount Athos, where
some not only permit no women, but permit no female animals either.

To be honest, I’ve always thought the guy was loony, which may just reflect my tender age when I first read him. He
nevertheless exerted a big influence on, and through, Tsiolkovsky; philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and author
Fyodor Dostoevsky were admirers too). Let me know if you’d like more info on Fyodorov, or suggestions of more
subtle and specialized approaches to his theories than that of your humble professor. It would be fun (in a
paper for this course?) to compare Fyodorov’s vision of a future society with the all-male homosexual society
on the planet Athos presented in Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel Ethan of Athos (1986).

SPECIAL NOTE: Just for fun, as I read this time, I kept track of Fyodorov’s references to sex or women:

p. 19, twice uses (pejoratively) the word “effeminate.”

p. 24, talks briefly abut “the force which compels the two sexes to unite in one flesh as a transition to
the being of a third by means of childbearing…”

p. 37, refers to both sons and daughters, in a complaint about Young People Today.

p. 42, discusses “paleography, the science of ancient and modern forms of writing which bear the imprint
of the transition from the old cult of the fathers to the new cult of the wives.”

p. 43, goes on about paleography, discussing Gothic letters, which “did not, of course, have that
womanish beauty which prevails now in the epoch of the cult of woman.” He really didn’t like the Art
Nouveau! (Which, it’s true, made shockingly frequent use of women, clothed or not, as decorative elements
in printing – see especially the Acmeist-tending Saint Petersburg journal Apollon, which started up
after Fyodorov’s death.)

p. 52, briefly mentions marriage.

And that’s it, over 38 pages: I didn’t count the number of mentions of Fathers, Sons, and Men, but it’s
clearly a male project. Some readers might charitably explain it as a unisex project – and both of those
tendencies show up later in Soviet SF. As Stites briefly suggests in his introduction, it would be lots
of fun to read Bogdanov side by side with Aleksandra Kollontai (1872-1952), a Russian revolutionary who
went from great power and (rhetorical) influence in 1917-18 to being parceled off as the first female
ambassador (to Norway, in 1923). She wrote no science fiction; (like Chernyshevsky) she wasn’t a
particularly good writer, but her fiction from the 1920s (Vasilisa Malygina; A Love of Worker
Bees) deals in extremely interesting ways with gender relations and free love.

The introduction is both thoughtful and informative – you might find some suggestions here for other
interesting works, though (as far as I know) many of the other early socialist or socialist-ish SF works
have not been translated into English. Richard Stites, author of the introduction, is a super historian:
he taught Russian History at Georgetown University and wrote the following excellent books:

To add to the introduction: As you’ll see in the novel, Bogdanov was already interested in blood transfusions
in 1908; in 1924 he started blood transfusion experiments, hoping to achieve human rejuvenation and
longevity. [Note: if you’ve ever read anything about the Romanian babies with AIDS who were discovered
languishing in orphanages after 1991, they had contracted HIV from blood transfusions routinely given to
newborns on the related theory that it made them more vigorous.) Bogdanov died in 1928 in Moscow, as
described in the afterword by Loren R. Graham, "Bogdanov's Inner Message." Not exactly a botched blood
transfusion (which some have interpreted it as a suicide, others as an early move by Stalin to knock
out the opposition – hm!), but certainly an experiment he knew was very risky.

Questions for reading, Part I:

What does it mean to have a politically engaged narrator? Anna Nikolaevna, the narrator’s apparently common-law
wife, is just as devoted to politics: they end their relationship because of political disagreement. The
Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks (let me know if you want more about their history) were two factions of the
same party, not two different parties! (It's worth noting how damn seriously they took what we might consider
minor points of doctrine.)

How do you react to the names (Menni, Sterni, Netti)? To me, they sound Finnish or Estonian – the double
consonants, and the lack of gender specificity to the Russian ear (almost all Russian women’s names end in –a).
It's telling that Finnish and Estonian (like other Finno-Ugrian languages) don't have pronouns that distinguish
gender; perhaps that's why Bogdanov picked names that sound like these.
How about the term etheroneph?

How do the Martians look, compared to other Martians you’ve known?

Pay attention to the descriptions of the space flight – how Earth looks from above; the sensations of decreasing
gravity and eventual weightlessness.

What’s Bogdanov’s primary interest and focus in the first part of this story?

On pp. 37, 41 and elsewhere: how does the science stack up? What role does the science play in the story?

Red Star was written to be popular reading – to appeal to proletarian readers and persuade them that
socialism is the best way – and it went through several editions after the Revolution. Does it read to you
like a best-seller? Why or why not?

After his scary dream our Leonid feels as if he should kiss Netti’s hand; on p. 42, “for some reason I felt
involuntarily attracted to him.” Late Swarthmore Professor of French George Moskos (in a paper entitled
“Getting Behind the Revolution: Alien Sexualities and the Sodomitical Scene in Red Star") reads the
dream scene as a homoerotic moment. I’ll pick this up in the second set of questions, but for now: how does
Leonid’s attraction to Netti, and Menni's smiles when Leonid talks about Netti, impact your reading of
their developing relationship, and their leaving the etheroneph together hand-in-hand (p. 59)?

Our narrator Leonid is a mathematician – does that impact his experience of the voyage?

How socialist is he, compared to the Martians? Notice when their statements or answers surprise him.

Why is our narrator so prone to vertigo?

What do you make of Martian linguistics (p. 48)?

What is the effect of Letta’s death (p. 50) – his own quick choice, the way that scene is described, our
narrator’s reaction, the reactions of the others on the ship?

Now and every time: what did you notice that these questions didn't point out?

Science and space travel form the matter of the first part of this novella, while the later parts concentrate
on Martian society… Feel free to skim these until you find something interesting to you, instead of slogging
through all of them.

We started the semester with a freshly translated work, and talked about its style, etc. How does this
translation read to you? (Charles Rougle has translated a number of other works from Russian: Nina
Gurianova’s Exploring Color. Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-Garde 1910-1918 [1999],
Boris Groys’s The Total Art of Stalinism [1992], and Valentin Kataev’s Embezzlers [1972],
among others. He also translates from Swedish, especially scholarly monographs on Russian literature,
and is fluent in Finnish. He edited the 1996 AATSEEL critical companion to Isaak Babel’s Red
Cavalry. Very cool.)

How does Russia appear in this work (in the narrator’s opinions and memories; in statements by the
various Martians)? Before, Leonid commented that Russia was especially full of life, but on p. 96 he
refers to himself as “Asiatic” (we’re presumably supposed to think that means backward or culturally
inferior).

Note the central planning of the system of labor and production; if you’ve taken Economics, how does the
system described here stack up?
Note too Menni’s comment, p. 66: “‘There is never any shortage of voluntary labor – work is a natural
need for the mature member of our society, and all overt or disguised compulsion is quite superfluous.’”
Socialists generally agree, and Russian SF will continue to assert once it becomes Soviet SF, that
human beings MUST labor in order to be happy, never mind to be productive members of society.

p. 78: It turns out that socialist poetry rhymes and scans. In fact, Socialist Realism kept Russian
poetry in a kind of “deep freeze” that lasted until the late 1980s; this was quite a bit less true of the
Eastern and Central European countries, where interwar poetry looked much like the poetry in the rest of
Europe or North America. Let me know if you’d like more information about this kind of thing.

Enno says (p. 80) that curbing the birth rate is the last thing the Martians would resort to – and
yet (as George Moskos points out) the sex and marriages we read about in Red Star apparently
don’t lead to conception. Consider as you read on: Is this a sexual utopia, or just weirdly different
from the earth?

p. 85: Note the brief mention of the role of mutual blood transfusions – later this was Bogdanov’s big
interest, but he was already considering the idea here.

Does the fact that Anna Nikolaevna, his former partner, is the first of the phantoms who approach him
suggest that the break with her wasn’t as clean and painless as we were led to believe? Have the
Martians misjudged his suitability, or the nature of human personality in general?

SPOILER ALERT:
If you’re reading these questions before you finish the novella, stop here and start again after you get to
p. 93!

p. 93: Netti reveals (in a surprisingly stylistically-marked way, not the calm and neutral way she has
spoken until now) that she is a woman. This is much more shocking in Russian, because all the verbs and
pronouns associated with Netti until now were masculine; the reader didn’t even question the idea that
Netti was a man. (Linguistic plausibility: if you're from a language that doesn't distinguish gender in
any grammatical way, it must be easier to speak with the other gender's forms - a kind of linguistic
transvestism that is more typical of written language. On the other hand, since we're told Netti knows
Russian quite well, having to use masculine forms when talking to Leonid must have reminded her
constantly that she had to hide her sex from him - and thus perhaps creating an energy of repression that
made him more attractive to her, highlighted his sex even as she hid her own?)
Is this revelation something you expected? (Does it convey anything particular that it’s the phantom of
his old revolutionary acquaintance Ibrahim – an “Asiatic” Muslim – who right before this asks Leonid “crudely”
whether he really can't see who his doctor really is?) How about the ensuing love scene? The violence, maybe
even pathology, of Leonid's desire? What light does it cast on the tininess (but strength) of Netti’s hand,
and whole body? How does it feel when Netti gives him a Martian name, Lenni?

You can’t tell this from the translation, but they don’t switch to using informal pronouns after
they have sex and then become a couple. If you’re familiar with formal and informal second persons,
how would you speculate on the meaning of this? (Mutual socialist respect?)

Why did Netti encourage Enno to hide her gender as well? How about Leonid's eventual affair with Enno?
(Why doesn’t she want to have children with him, if she rejects birth control for Martians? Why
not just “resist his caresses”?) What can you infer about the sex drive on Mars from the behavior
of these two women? What can you infer about the human sex drive from Leonid’s behavior?

Is it plausible that Enno, who has been merry and lively before her affair with Leonid, is now meek and sad?

What do you make of Netti’s sexual history, once we learn it (p. 104: Eek, they’re not monogamous!),
and of Leonid’s pathological response? What are Leonid’s failures in Martian society – in your opinion,
and in his own socialist self-criticism (pp. 134-5)?

There's a certain trace of pathology in the Martian society as well: we hear about workers being sort of
hypnotized by the rhythm of heavy machinery and barely being saved from going under the big hammer; Enno
is prepared to commit suicide after ending her marriage to Menni; Menni himself is distracted and held
back from his creative work by sex, and makes great leaps forward once she leaves him. Several of them
speak in ways that make clear that Martians need to balance work and relaxation, that they are vulnerable
to a variety of mental conditions that timely intervention and loving support from their fellows help
to avert or eventually cure. What do you make of Netti's response to Leonid's murder of Sterni?

What changes after Leonid returns to Earth, and has he “redeemed” himself by the time Netti returns
to collect him?

A great book that would be relevant to this discussion, though it deals with later authors, is Eliot Borenstein's
Men without Women: Masculinty and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929 (in McCabe).

Perhaps the most interesting thing in this book is the trouble with gender and sexuality. George Moskos was
right to point out queer elements of the text: Leonid's dream about Menni makes him feel powerless in a way
that’s not entirely unpleasant; he wakes from that to feel attracted to Netti, taking her for Menni (and
wanting to kiss her hand - both an erotic move and a pre-Revolutionary way to greet an upper-class
woman); twice he refers to Netti as a brother or a man, which provokes Menni to smile. We later learn
that Netti and Enno agreed to hide from Leonid that they were women - making the ship appear to be "manned" by
a single-sex crew. When a woman is in drag (be it in the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare or in the misconception
of our narrator), it always raises issues of gender and sexuality, who and what we are attracted to. As if (I
think) Bogdanov means us to be concerned: uh-oh, Leonid’s attracted to this man Netti: what if he turns out to
be gay? What if Menni is gay and smiles because Netti is not his brother, but his lover? Then we’re supposed
to be relieved (or titillated?) when he learns (as do we) that Netti’s a woman. It’s telling that once Netti
reveals her sex, Lenid says, “But please, let Menni remain a man, because it would be terrible if I were to fall
in love with him!” – even though he’s free now to love Netti, the idea of falling in love with Menni seems to
continue to trouble him, and Netti gives him an odd look. (?) Bogdanov seems to take it for granted that having
women in a spaceship's crew would be dreadfully distracting to Earthmen - and even our calm Martian Netti has
started a second marriage, with Letta, when she discovers that he has not known the pleasures of a woman's
caresses.

About Leonid’s heterosexual relationships: Once he finds out Netti is a woman, he thrusts himself on her, and
she comments “your love is like murder.” (Does “your” mean Leonid’s, or does it mean all humans’? we can’t tell,
since she’s using the formal/plural pronoun.) After Netti leaves for Venus he starts sleeping with Enno, but
then freaks out when he learns that Netti used to be married to Sterni (and then at the same time to Letta, who
at least is already dead so doesn't need to be murdered later - though in a way Leonid is responsible for his
death too). As an Earthman, he's plausibly a bearer of the old double standard - but why would a nice Martian
like Netti be attracted to that? ("He killed my ex-husband, he must really care for me!") Troubling.

I'm leaving out the influence of the records of Sterni, Netti and Menni discussing what to do with the Earth,
which definitely impacts Leonid's attitude towards Sterni. Their last conversation certainly shows Leonid as
obsessed with both Sterni's marriage to Netti, and with Sterni's words about exterminating humanity; he's also
barely articulate and certainly not in a normal mental state.

Bogdanov’s treatment of sex draws on the Victorian and general Christian distrust of sex, reflected in the
asceticism of a lot of revolutionary fiction even when it was written by non-believers (Kollontai's an exception;
Chernyshevsky’s exemplary Rakhmetov in What Is to Be Done sleeps on a bed of nails to mortify his flesh!).
On the other hand, fin-de-siècle decadence made consideration of non-monogamy and even hints of homosexual
attraction part of literary discourse and thus possible here. In the end it’s all right because Netti
promises that she’ll be with him alone; because he’s been wounded in the revolutionary fight – “punished” for
his violence with Netti, Enno, and Sterni, and maybe also tamed a bit by this physical suffering?

Bogdanov seems to run out of ideas for new characters once the etheroneph gets to Mars. We wind up meeting three
women - Netti, Enno, and Nella - and Leonid winds up sleeping with two of them. Would the broad socialist
possibiity of Mars feel more persuasive if Leonid actually met a few more people?